Today, Email has become an important application for everyday communication and interaction among people. Email can be a primary form of communication, especially for transnational companies with global business practices spreading over extensive geographical regions and different time zones. In some companies, for example, it is common to communicate about a certain subject via Email. In this case, upon receipt of an Email, users often submit comments about contents related to the subject of that Email, and then reply to and/or forward the Email accordingly. Furthermore, as to those Emails replied or forwarded under the same subject, it is common for the recipients to send additional replies, or to forward those additional Emails. In these cases, Emails associated with the same subject can constitute a single Email thread. In order to clarify the response relationship within an Email thread and help understanding internal logical relationship of contents of the Email based on the response relationship within an Email thread, in the prior arts, Emails can be rearranged based on the response relationship.
FIG. 1 illustrates reorganization of an Email thread based on the response relationship among Emails. It can be seen that there are two direct replies “Re: meeting time” under the Email subject “meeting time”, each of which has other two direct replies “Re: Re: meeting time” respectively. A recipient can read the Emails based the displayed response relationship among Emails to gain an understanding of the contents of the Emails.
However, the Email thread organized based on the response relationship among Emails cannot aggregate interaction content therein, and thus fail to reflect true interaction procedure and current state. In the case where an addresser needs to reply to a number of Emails under the same subject, for example, he can only reply to different Emails respectively, or reply to one of them without replying to other Emails simultaneously, possibly confusing the recipient. It is necessary for the recipient to review those Emails repeatedly to understand the causal relationship among the contents. Therefore, the Email thread constructed based on the response relationship cannot truly reflect an interaction among the logical sequence of contents of Emails, and can cause the user inconvenience to read the contents and submit the reply. It is difficult to understand the current status of interaction unless the user manually aggregates the contents of the multiple Emails.
Therefore, it is desired to improve existing Email systems by providing an Email-based method and system suitable for interaction applications, and thus enhancing user interaction experience and improving interaction efficiency.